Replication of documents across a network can be a resource intensive process. When a content creator generates new content and/or an update for existing content, such as by using an author instance or server instance of a content management tool, it can be desirable to replicate that new content to various publish instances or other clients. ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER is an example of a content management tool. Conventionally, document replication can be performed by having the content creator (such as an author instance of a content management tool) replicate each of the documents on a client (such as a publish instance of a content management tool), leading to a separate network communication session between the server and each client for each document that is replicated. In addition to being a tedious process for the content creator, the amount of network traffic to perform these replications can increase rapidly if there are a large number of clients.
One alternative to individual replication of documents by a user can be to use rules to automatically select documents for replication. While rule-based replication may be convenient for replication of an entire corpus of documents and/or for replication of exactly the same documents multiple times, it can be difficult to generate sufficient numbers of rules to account for all of the different types of minor updates that might be desirable. Additionally, not all users are comfortable with developing complex rules to handle specific replication situations. Moreover, these traditional methodologies can consume excessive amounts of network bandwidth or computing resources (e.g., processing power), particularly when rules are poorly designed or are over-reaching.